Palapye.com News Blog

West Africa cable `online by 2011`

The US$600-million, 14 000km West Africa Cable System linking southern and western African countries with Europe should be in service by 2011, providing high capacity international bandwidth and further reducing telecommunications costs on the continent.

A consortium of leading African and foreign telecoms operators signed a construction and maintenance agreement with manufacturer Alcatel-Lucent last month to construct the 8.84-terabit-per-second, fibre-optic submarine cable and its landing points.

Companies that signed the agreement include South Africa’s Broadband Infraco, MTN, Tata Communications/Neotel, Telkom and Vodacom, as well as Angola Telecom, Cable & Wireless, Telecom Namibia, Portugal Telecom, Sotelco and Togo Telecom.